


Sanctuary Coast

by devilinthedetails



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Alternative Timeline, Brother-Sister Relationships, Family, Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Nightmare, Sanctuary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 20:04:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20476724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: In an alternative timeline, Leia Organa meets her birth mother.





	Sanctuary Coast

Sanctuary Coast

Leia was six when she was swept up by a hurricane. The hurricane came when she was curled in slumber beneath the blankets of her sleep coach, head resting on pillows that felt fluffy and white as clouds. It tore through the glass doors that separated the gilded balcony overlooking the inland sea from her bedroom in the royal family’s villa in Sanctuary Coast, a city built on stilts that Leia constantly feared would fall into the foaming water.

The wind that had been so rough breaking through the glass doors was gentle as it gathered her up into the calm of its eye. The hurricane churned around her, sweeping her shimmersilk nightgown about her ankles, and making her heart leap with terror or excitement—she couldn’t be sure which, or even if they were different emotions and not the same feeling making her heart pound against her ribs.

She expected to be carried over the inland sea and then to be dropped—to plummet to her death beneath the churning durasteel gray waves or against the rocks spattered with guano. Instead she was swallowed into a whirling darkness that felt like a black hole. This was, she thought, how it must feel to travel through space and time.

Dizzy, she emerged from the dark into the light, the hurricane still spiraling around her. It released her and she fell into a flowerbed. Shocked by the sudden fall, she barely managed to lift her hands in front of her face to cushion the impact. Her palms stung, dirt flying into her eyes, and she was grateful for the crimson blossoms—millaflowers from Naboo, she thought— that smoothed her landing. Gasping, she stared around her, trying to understand where she was.

She looked to be in the seafront garden of another Sanctuary Coast villa, but this Sanctuary Coast was lit by a golden sun shining in an ocean blue as the arching dome of sky stretching overhead. From across the garden, a woman with the soft, beautiful but sad expression Leia recognized from her dreams—the dreams of a crying woman who had panted out her name, Leia—ran toward her.

“Where am I?” Leia was dazed, but the woman seemed kind and familiar enough that she felt comfortable asking.

“Sanctuary Coast.” The woman gave a smile that Leia sensed contained more sorrow than joy. “You’re safe here. Everyone is safe here.”

Leia remembered her politics tutor telling her that Sanctuary Coast had been established centuries ago by beings fleeing the old Galactic Republic Wars. During the Clone Wars, her tutor had explained her in excruciating detail, Sanctuary Coast had stayed true to its tradition of embracing refugees, welcoming many of those displaced in the conflict between the Republic and the Separatists. Now that the Republic was an Empire, her tutor had concluded in a whisper that many fugitives on the Empire’s most wanted list sought a hiding place in Sanctuary Coast.

The lecture had bored Leia. Exhaling gustily, she had folded her arms across her chest, rolled her eyes, and repeated in a haughty tone a phrase she had heard her mother, Queen Breha, utter on occasion: “That’s officially too much information.”

She hadn’t known what it meant exactly, but it had earned her an extra essay as punishment for her rudeness.

Looking into the woman’s face and sensing how grateful the woman was for this place of refuge, Leia for the first time felt remorse for her dismissive attitude toward her tutor’s instruction on Sanctuary Coast’s history as a safe space for all who felt threatened in the galaxy.

Despite all her years of etiquette lessons, she didn’t know what to say. Fortunately, the woman didn’t appear to expect a response as she went on, holding out her palms, “Let me see your hands, sweetheart.”

Leia should have bristled at being referred to with such an endearment by a stranger, but that odd feeling of familiarity with this woman brought a warm feeling to her heart as she placed her hands in the woman’s outstretched ones, seeing for the first time how stained they were with dirt. Her aunts, she could imagine, would scold her until they ran out of breath if they could see her now, assuring her in no uncertain terms that a princess of Alderaan had never been so filthy, and she would bring disgrace down on the entire illustrious history of House Organa.

“Ah, you’re a mess from your fall.” The woman’s tongue clicked against her mouth, but sympathetically not reproachfully. Like a mother, she decided, not a pesky aunt. “Come inside and I’ll tidy you up.”

Leia found herself escorted into a refresher where the woman scrubbed her hands clean, the dirt disappearing down the drain. Drying Leia’s hands, the woman invited, “Would you like to keep me company for awhile?”

Leia got the impression that this sad woman didn’t get many visitors, so she agreed. She followed the woman into a living room. Settling into the veda sofa, she found her attention captured by an oil canvas on the wall depicting a woman with copper-gold hair blowing in a stormy wind as she knelt over a figure emerging from the ocean. The woman on the canvas seemed as sad and beautiful as the woman sitting on the coach across from her.

Noticing where her gaze had fallen, the woman on the sofa remarked, “It’s a classical Naboo painting. It wasn’t easy to have it bought and brought here secretly, but it reminds me of home.”

“Is Naboo your home?” Leia tilted her head.

“It was my home.” The woman sighed. “Now I can never go back there. It would attract too much attention from the Empire. I have to hide here like so many others.”

“Why do you have to hide here?” Leia’s forehead furrowed. The woman didn’t seem like a criminal who would have to flee from the law.

“The same reason I had to hide my daughter with a trusted friend.” The woman’s eyes locked on Leia’s face as if willing her to understand the incomprehensible. “My husband was a hero of the Clone Wars. If the Emperor knew that I lived and so did my daughter, he would kill us both.”

“Am I your daughter?” Leia had always known that she was adopted—that she was the child of a hero from the Clone Wars.

“Yes.” Grief rippled through the woman’s expression like a stone disturbing a pond’s tranquil surface as a commotion echoed from the streets outside the villa. “Forgive me, Leia, but you must leave now. The Empire is coming to conduct another search for fugitives, and you can’t be caught here.”

Leia had a foreboding sense that the woman shouldn’t be caught by the Empire either, and she burst out, “I don’t want to leave you.”

“You must.” The woman cupped Leia’s cheeks between her palms, and Leia had the sense the woman was memorizing her features. “Don’t worry. I’ll remember you, though. I remember everyone that leaves.”

“How do I leave?” Leia frowned as it occurred to her that since she had no idea how she had arrived her, she had no clue how to leave.

“I think”—The woman’s fingers combed through Leia’s hair—“that if you went into the garden and leapt, you’d find your way back to where you belong—where you’ll be safe from the Empire.”

Leia didn’t want to leave this woman alone in her sadness, but the boots of stormtroopers could be heard marching up the permacrete path to the villa, and the woman nudged her out the back door to the garden, urging her, “Go before the Empire finds you.”

Spurred by the desperation in the woman’s voice, Leia obeyed, leaping into the air. The hurricane swept her up again. Wind whistled in her ears, howling like a mother torn from her child, and rain whipped against her cheeks.

She landed with a thump on her sleep coach, her throat dry and scratchy as if she had been crying for a long time.

“Leia!” Hands shook her shoulders, and she looked into the worried eyes of Queen Breha, the woman who had raised her as a daughter. “What’s wrong, dear?”

“You were calling for your mother,” her father added, standing in the shadows of her bedroom’s doorway.

Sitting up on her sleep coach, Leia discovered that her blankets and shimmersilk nightgown were soaked with sweat.

“I was swept up in a hurricane and just got back.” Leia found it was hard to speak with a mouth that felt full of sand.

“A nightmare only.” Her adoptive mother—the only mother she had ever really known—kissed her clammy forehead soothingly. “There was no hurricane, darling.”

“There was no hurricane,” Leia repeated, struggling to absorb this and wondering if the woman she met had been real or fake.

Years later, when Luke, raised by his aunt and uncle on Tatooine, asked her adopted child to adopted child, if she remembered her real mother, it was of this woman—who bore such an uncanny resemblance to her now only with more grief carved into the lines of her face as if by some cruel sculptor—that she thought as she answered in that dark Endor forest, “Just a little bit. She died when I was very young.”

When Luke pressed her for what she remembered, she thought of the marching boots of the stormtroopers hunting the haunted woman she had met during the hurricane that never happened and fumbled for words to describe the impossible. “Just images really, feelings. She was very beautiful, kind, but sad.”

She gazed at Luke, sensing the same sorrow she had felt in the woman she had met during the hurricane and posed a question of her own that would sweep her up into another hurricane: “Why are you asking me this?”

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 72 hour Mod Time Challenge at the Jedi Council Forum. My random element was a leap. My forecast was a hurricane. My required line of dialogue was: "That's officially too much information." My recycled challenge quote was: "I'll remember you, though. I remember everyone that leaves." My TV Trope was alternative timeline. My reaction gif was crossed arms, a sigh, and an eye roll. My artwork can be seen here. My picture prompt was dirty hands. Thanks to the Mods for coming up with these prompts to inspire me to write an Alternative Timeline piece, which I've never done before!


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